Tim, it wasn't you who almost fell off your chair in derision of the Clare Harmon poem, so I don't see why you've assumed I'm accusing you personally of being 'unpleasant'. It was a poetry world in which poems get singled out in this manner that I was calling that. 
  But anyway I don't think you personally try very hard to keep names out of it at all, and are increasingly abusive. You can call it honest if you like, but maybe you could keep it for the pub. In the last year or so you've referred to a named poet you thought 'a tit', another as 'stupid' and delivered yourself of a long, negative and suppositious spiel about the character of Don Paterson. I'm aware the latter has written aggressively about avant-garde poetry, but not in this kind of 'ad hominem' fashion. Every time I've raised this issue on the list I have come in for personal abuse - not from you I should add. But this time once again, David asks me whether I am a fan of container ships. What is this meant to say? Then after much 'self-prodding' he starts ranting about 'bewildered solipsists' and 'fraudsters' who only write for money. Unpleasant is far too mild a term for this.
  I don't agree with your characterisation of the poems on the shortlist as 'poetic slush' at all, nor do I necessarily think any belong to the 'mainstream', evidence no doubt that I live in 'la-la land', but having expended fruitless hours on this list defending individual poems and poets from these kinds of attacks, I'm afraid I can no longer be bothered to do so. And I'm beginning to doubt your own ability to tell the difference between cliche' and a box of whatever's your foodstuff of choice.
Jamie



> On 6 Oct 2015, at 11:29, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Jamie, - I know nothing about Clare Harmon - but so what - do I really need to? do I need to have some biographical knowledge that will suddenly change my opinion of the quality of her poem. This prize list is for Best Poem of the Year - not, Best Prize for A Poem by someone who hasn't had a book out yet'. And what has the fact that she's written a biography of R.L. Stevenson got to do with anything.
> 
> I know, I get it, I should have kept my reaction to those poems to myself - just talked about them in the pub - not aired my views here. Well I think it is a lot more honest and a lot more healthy to speak out. Feel free to defend the poems against my opinion but don't just accuse me of being 'unpleasant'. I know I have probably broken list protocol, we try not to bring in 'names', but if a discussion about the Prize culture is going on and here we have a demonstration of it in action I think it is fair game to actually look.
> 
> OK, let's be clearer - Apart from Andrew Elliott's poem the other 4 are poetic slush, shaped and compacted into just the right form to appeal to the 'OO' and the 'AH' of a critical abyss that can't tell the difference between a cliche and a box of potatoes (don't know why I said potatoes). 
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Tim Allen (just added my Sir name so some other Tim doesn't get the blame for this scurrilous and unpleasant attack on the innocent)  
> 
>> On 6 Oct 2015, at 02:19, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Carrie,
>> From some quarters of the list, I'm afraid, you're more likely to hear the cheerless sound of derisive laughter, in this case directed at someone who has yet to publish a book of poems. An unpleasant world to be entering. Clare Harmon has written, among other things, a fine biography of R.L.Stevenson, so I don't think she needs to pay any attention.
>> Jamie
>> 
>> 
>>> On 5 Oct 2015, at 18:46, Carrie Etter <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Wolfgang, two of the Forward Prize books were originally published in the US, Rankine's and Siegel's, then published in the UK. Tim, the five finalist poems came from 225 poems submitted, and only a tiny, tiny percentage of those might be called avant garde or experimental or what you will. I would think this list would be glad to have seen Rankine and Riley on the best book prize shortlist. 
>>> 
>>> Yours in exhaustion,
>>> Carrie